Crucial started shipping its M500 line of consumer SSDs. Available in 2.5-inch SATA (7 mm-thick), mSATA, and NGFF M.2 form-factors, the drives combine Micron 20 nm MLC NAND flash with a Marvell-made processor. All three form-factors take advantage of 6 Gb/s SATA. The drive is available in 120 GB, 240 GB, and 480 GB capacities for all three form-factors, while the 2.5-inch gets a 960 GB "terabyte-class" capacity option, as well.

Sequential read speeds on all capacities are as high as 500 MB/s, while sequential write speeds cap out at 130 MB/s and 250 MB/s for the 120 GB and 240 GB variants, respectively; and reach 400 MB/s on the 480 GB and 960 GB variants. The drives are backed by 3-year limited warranties, 1.2 million hours MTBF, and 72 TB total bytes written (TBW) write endurance (that's 40 GB per day). TRIM, NCQ, and SMART are standard issue. The 120 GB, 240 GB, 480 GB, and 960 GB variants are priced at US $129.99, $219.99, $399.99, and $599.99, respectively.

So, what makes these better than "old" M4's ? Their write speeds are still just as rubbish as on old series, so what gives!? They only provide bigger drives. They could just as well do that under the M4 branding...

So, what makes these better than "old" M4's ? Their write speeds are still just as rubbish as on old series, so what gives!? They only provide bigger drives. They could just as well do that under the M4 branding...

Wow, the 960GB one is actually sanely priced... up 'till now, every single SSD of beyond 480/512 GB had insanely inflated prices... Heck, even the 480/512 GB ones where more expensive per GB than 240/256 ones... So I'm hoping SSD's are finally seeing the move to 480/512 GB as a sweet spot.

So, what makes these better than "old" M4's ? Their write speeds are still just as rubbish as on old series, so what gives!? They only provide bigger drives. They could just as well do that under the M4 branding...

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They're not better than the old M4s. They use new, larger, higher latency chips and real-world performance in similarly sized drives will be similar or worse vs. the M4, outside of a few specific areas that have seen architectural improvements. The main deal with these drives is that they'll bring down the cost of 1TB SSDs by 50% or so.

They're not better than the old M4s. They use new, larger, higher latency chips and real-world performance in similarly sized drives will be similar or worse vs. the M4, outside of a few specific areas that have seen architectural improvements. The main deal with these drives is that they'll bring down the cost of 1TB SSDs by 50% or so.

Even in the games where the superior computational performance of the 9800GTX allowed it to pull-ahead, at any reasonable level of resolution and AA, its narrower memory bus left the 8800GTX with superior minimum FPS.

Well, I'd like to see a internal triple/quad RAID 0 with 960/1024 GB SSDs like these, for something less than 1000 $ in a old-fashioned 3.5" size... on that SATA Express thingy I'm looking forward to for a while... so as to they wouldn't have excuses to why I haven't see benched SSD speeds higher than 565MB/s or so...